- From: Philip Taylor <excors+whatwg@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:02:16 +0100
On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Kristof Zelechovski<giecrilj at stegny.2a.pl> wrote: > !DOCTYPE html6 would be an abomination, unless the root element changes to > html6 also :-) Also it would trigger quirks mode in many existing browsers, and in any conforming HTML5 implementation. You'd have to use something like <!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM "6"> as the shortest string that provides a version identifier, if you insist on putting it in the doctype. (The HTML5 doctype reflects that in practice there aren't several independent carefully-separated languages - there's just a single vaguely-defined mess called HTML, described in a range of specifications and sometimes not specified at all, implemented incrementally with various extensions and bugs and missing features in various browsers, with people writing pages that mix all the different features together. The version numbering is an artifact of the W3C's process of developing a numbered sequence of specifications, and isn't aligned with how HTML browsers or documents are usually written. If you want to check that your pages are compatible with certain browser releases, the language version number is a very bad approximation - you'd want a tool that understands what features IE10 supports (maybe some (but not all) from HTML4, some (but not all) from HTML5, some proprietary extensions, etc), and it would be misleading to think that a pure HTML-version-N validator is going to be good enough for that. Maybe you want some in-band mechanism for identifying which pages a spider should check with which rules, but then something like <meta name="check-ua-compatibility" content="ie=10;fx=5"> seems a better solution than a language version number in the doctype; if the problem is real, it should be examined independently of these particular solutions.) -- Philip Taylor excors at gmail.com
Received on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 04:02:16 UTC